Groups Overview

Groups

Groups are an important part of the Community section of your Platform.  They contain their own forums, pages, and files that can only be shared with or viewed by other group members.

My Groups

Clicking the Groups tab in the main navigation will bring you to the My Groups page.  From here, you can view all the groups in which you are a member.  You can filter through these groups by displaying all your groups, groups you own, groups you are in, groups you are invited to, and groups you want to join.  If you are not a member of any groups, you can find groups by clicking the Find Groups button in the upper right, or clicking the Try searching for groups to join! link that appears when no groups appear on your My Groups page.

Create Groups

Administrators can allow everyone to create groups, only staff members and administrators to create groups, or only administrators to create groups.  If you have the ability to create a group, you will see a Create Group button in the upper right.  The various options for Group creation are:

• Group Name (required)

• Group Description

• Group type - You can choose from a number of options which determine how other users may join your group.

• Standard: Open Membership - This type will allow any user of the site to become a member simply by visiting the group page and clicking the join button.

• Standard: Request Membership - This setting means that any user can request to join your group, however as owner you can choose to accept or decline this request.  The requesting member will automatically be notified of your decision.

• Standard: Invite Only - This setting means that only users that you have sent an invite to may join your group.

• Standard: Controlled Membership - This setting is only available to Administrators and Staff Members, and allows you to add and remove people from a group directly.

  Course Groups - These are a special type of group which can only be created by Administrators and Staff of the site.  Course groups can contain tutors as well as ordinary members.  All members of course groups can submit their pages to the group for assessment by tutors.  When tutors give feedback on a submitted page, they can also attach a file to the feedback which is only visible to the page's author.

• Course: Request Membership - Users may join the group by requesting membership, described under the Request Membership heading above.

• Course: Controlled Membership - These group types allow group administrators to add and remove people from the group directly.  Tutors can only add people to the group directly.  Users cannot remove themselves from a controlled group.

• Publicly Viewable Group? - Allow people who are not logged in to view this group, including the forums.  Everyone will be able to see the group member listing, and see all discussions in the forums.  However, people will still have to become a member of the group before they can post to the forums.  Regardless of this setting, your group file section and all files inside it will remain private.

• Users auto-added? - Automatically put all new users who sign up to the site into this group.  If you say yes, everyone who signs up to this site will be added to this group.  Depending on the group type, the users may still have the option to leave the group.

• Shared page notifications - If checked a notification will be sent to every group member whenever a member shares one of their pages with the group.  Enabling this setting in very large groups can produce a lot of notifications.